Salman Rushdie
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.
His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), was at the center of The Satanic Verses controversy, with protests from Muslims including Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, with Rushdie facing death threats and a fatwā (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, in February, 1989. In response to the call for him to be killed, Rushdie spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically, but was outspoken on the fatwā's censoring effect on him as an author and the threat to freedom of expression it embodied.
